Just before dusk on a rooftop farm in Copenhagen—Denmark’s quaint but fashionable capital—the fall sky spins from yellow to gray like the arms on a clock. It’s Thursday, which means ØsterGro, an otherwise quiet and sanctuary-esque 60-meter urban rooftop farm in a northeast corner of the city, is coming alive with the sounds of clinking glassware and vintage dishes being doled out across a table like cards from a deck. A few staffers light candles and set out cold bottles of Danish dry cider for arriving guests. And behind the greenhouse, Mette Helbak stands peacefully clipping herbs in a pretty blue linen apron, her Scandinavian-blonde hair cascading out from under a wide-brimmed hat.

Helbak is one of the Danish cofounders of Stedsans, an enviably chic communal dining space that she runs on weekends with her husband, chef Flemming Hansen, in a greenhouse in the center of the farm. Since launching their dinner experiences in May, the two, who look a bit like J.Crew models in the wild, have brought big attention to the tiny space, attracting patrons from around the globe. Tickets to their farm-driven, high-style dinner parties quickly began to sell out from the very first week, and by the end of the season were snatched up in seconds. For the most part, Hansen, a chef by trade, takes the reins in the kitchen and drink pairing, while Helbak—who honed her design skills through years of food photography styling—creates the fairy-tale setting, laying out fluffy lambskins on communal benches, arranging perfectly mismatched china, and creating native floral arrangements from her backyard. It was she who hatched the idea of hosting the greenhouse gatherings earlier this year.

If you happen to spot Helbak among the planted beds, walking with clippers in hand and farm gloves on, you’ll notice she wears the part of the urban farmer well. But in actuality, she and Hansen rent their greenhouse space from friends who own the farm and operate it as a community-supported agriculture market (or CSA) for around 40 members. Looking out upon the space over dinner, you would never know the area experienced a cool, mild summer: Still, in November, the neatly planted rows are overrun with vibrant, jungle-y green in the shape of bushy kale leaves, carrot stalks, and stems upon stems of pungent herbs.

Some might say ØsterGro and its tiny, rustic restaurant are a most unlikely finding in Copenhagen, a city where for years now, umpteen-course foraged-everything restaurant menus and modernist, formal settings like the ones at world-famous Noma (which will be shuttering in January 2017 and re-opening as an urban farm concept) have supposedly been the main draw of the culinary elite. But here, perched above a strip of car dealerships in a section of the city strewn mostly with commercial buildings, Michelin stars and the S.Pellegrino List world restaurant rankings feel, thankfully, worlds away from anything that matters to the inspired cocreators.

If little black books were still a thing, Helbak says those who knew of her and her husband even before Stedsans would have probably filed them under “caterers who are good with vegetables”—the best she can do to explain the reputation they’ve built for their out-of-the-box, farm-focused dining perspective. Even after spending a night at dinner with her, you might find it head-tiltingly hard to define what exactly Helbak “is” in the context of a straight-and-narrow career. With past and current stretches working as a local food writer and food photography stylist, as well as former gigs waitressing, working on the chef line, editing a restaurant guide, and even owning her own string of three boutique vegetable markets in the city, she seems to have had nearly every food-related job there is. While none of them, Helbak says, could have defined her on their own—and the vegetable market failed outright—were it not for each of them she might not have landed in her present happy place, hosting intimate dinners on a rooftop oasis.

“To me, my mistakes have been the most valuable choices I’ve made,” she says. “That is where I found out what I really wanted to do—and now I’m doing it exactly the way I want.” While a long road of working, as she says, “too hard for too long and too little money” in the food world inspired her to launch Stedsans (a word that means “sense of direction” in Danish), the idea and execution came on quickly and at once, like an entrepreneurial big bang.

“It was spring and we had very little time and very little money, so we really made decisions out of scarcity,” Helbak says. “The plates are from thrift stores and a lot of the furs [on the benches] are from my own home. For a time we were planning to find nicer chairs or spend more money on perfecting the details later, but then we started to realize it just worked the way it was. We still don’t have even a blender in the kitchen,” she laughs, adding that the roof was still being built over the kitchen area on their first day of dinnerservice.

What they do have works well enough to pull off two pinch-me beautiful dinners a night for 24-plus people, and has attracted everyone from food- and style-obsessed travelers to international journalists. They’ve sold out every dinner since their first, and now have long lists—sometimes in the hundreds—of people who the small space simply couldn’t accommodate. Most of the word about the events, Helbak says, spread through social media like Instagram.

In the ever more crowded world of supper clubs and pop-up markets, not every communal dinner you find on the Internet is going to be the stuff of dreams—especially one that clings to a food style (farm-to-table) that’s been amply celebrated. So how does the duo distinguish their concept from all of the other farm fetes and DIY dinner parties on the platform, not to mention the world-class restaurants in their very own city? Maybe it’s the menu, Helbak guesses, the creation of which she says is her favorite part of the week. “[Flemming and I] sit down on Mondays and have a nice quiet day together to talk the menus over.” Their ritual involves calling “the guys” (the pair’s favorite farm vendors from just outside the city) and brainstorming dishes based on what they have available. “The food is a mix of Flemming’s and my tastes. He’s extremely rustic. He likes things hardly cut and hardly cooked. I like things to be a little more styled.”

The rest of their success, Helbak seems both hopeful and hesitant to wager, is from just doing what feels right. “We’re not trying to push the boundaries and do avant-garde food here. I’m really just happy about vegetables and love to work with them. Of course, it’s important to me that everything is pretty, too, and this space was here and worked beautifully.” With admirable seriousness, she goes on about her mission: “I want to deliver the message from Mother Earth that she’s there for us, and just show how pretty nature is, on my plate.”

The space alone is worth buying a plane ticket for—even the string lights overhead seem to be enjoying the green-washed view beneath. But after spending a night under their glow, you will quickly realize that it’s the food—the glorious, colorful, unabashedly pretty, balanced, bright, and still decadent food—that is the real reason people deem stalking the website for a ticket worthwhile: Helbak and Hansen have developed a signature style all their own, whether they meant to or not. Most often, it involves an artful mishmash of vegetables or (sustainably raised, local) meats with vibrant, contrasting garnishes atop a rustic board or platter. As the dishes roll out through the sliding doors, you might see al dente roasted carrots with their green stems still attached and a cocoa nib-basil topping; two kinds of baby cabbages, one sumptuously butter-glazed and the other heartily chargrilled; tender, pink morsels of veal heart with brighter pink sour-sweet onions and an aioli sauce. Desserts can be as seemingly simple as seasonal pears with whipped cream, rich melted chocolate, and edible flowers, but they startle in flavor and loveliness.

Perhaps the most impressive feat of all is how they pull it all off in Stedsans’s meager kitchen space, which currently consists of only two stand-alone gas burners and a shoddy convection oven the size of a large microwave. No more than 15 feet away, a dirt-filled pen of chickens happily clucks away in the background.

Tickets for Stedsans’s dinners—which include wine pairings so smart and refreshingly different you might even call them cutting-edge (the pair offer homemade kombucha or local juices for people who don’t drink wine)— include five courses at a first seating and six at a second, when the open-ended meal time allows for an extra. They cost the U.S. equivalent of around $130 and, of course, require a willingness to be adventurous: You might find yourself seated next to a solo traveler from Germany, a honeymooning couple from Australia, or one of Copenhagen’s most famous chefs. (Christian Puglisi, chef-owner of Relae, and Claus Meyer, cofounder of Noma, have both been in.) Even her staffers have hailed all the way from places like Hawaii and Northern California to help. If you sit near the kitchen, you may catch them talking about their hand-inked tattoos or casually deliberating whether or not to poach an ingredient an hour before it’s served, never once seeming to break a sweat.

One drizzly night this October, a near-final crew of lucky-feeling guests sat eagerly awaiting dinner, their heads rotating like owls’ to take in every inch of the experience and the farm, their fingers fidgeting in anticipation with the pretty vines laid across the table. (The florals, Helbak says, change daily, and all the cut flowers and plants are either picked from her yard, foraged from the ocean, or plucked wild from around the city, like the efeu tonight —“it’s one of those plants that are crawling on buildings,” Helbak says.) The whole thing feels like a dreamworld, where not even the city dwellers just a few stories below can be privy to the dinner chatter or see the candlelight flickering off the greenhouse walls.

“It’s really important [to the dining experience today] that guests are having a good time and not just showing up to see what the chefs can do and admire their skills,” Helbak says. “[The restaurant scene in Copenhagen] has been that way for many years—where you’re seated at these huge tables eating reindeer moss or fried cotton or something, and you can hardly speak to one another. But I think a lot of chefs are starting to put emphasis on the feeling-good part again.” Part of ØsterGro and Stedsans’s charm, she hopes, is the chance they offer to step onto the farm, where stresses of the day begin to fall away and people start to feel relaxed and comfortable. “Hopefully they leave a little bit calmer and a little bit happier than they were when they came.”